Commentary on comics, games, books, and their occasional intersection with politics and other serious business.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Battletech 3087, The New Year: Dragoons Pact

So a while back I wanted to run a Battletech Strategic Game. I set it in the "distant future" of 3087. The Battletech timeline has since moved on 31...something? I'm not in a blogging mood recently, but I did find some of my old fiction for it. Each piece covers a different faction. This one is a news clip giving an overview of The Dragoons Pact, a mercenary nation-state that sits around Terra.

Harlech, Outreach, Dragoons Pact

While other parts of the Inner Sphere and Terra have already celebrated the New Year, on Outreach, the party is just beginning. However, the proud parade of battlemechs and the procession of war heroes, government leaders, and celebrities are not the most remarkable New Year’s events here.

On Outreach, every holiday sees Harlech’s main boulevard, Outreach Avenue, shut down, and the bustling traffic replaced with peaceful, but passionate protestors.

The city’s 3072 redesign, one of the first public acts of the Dragoons Pact, saw government buildings with no discrete side or rear entrances, no private garages, and no rooftop helicopter pads, all fixtures of modern government architecture--even reported Clan designs built on a central structure of classical stonework. On days like this, constabularies form the only barrier between protestors and government officials making their way to and from their offices.

Protestors in the capitol city, and across the Dragoons Pact, speak out against a variety of causes: the mercenary work performed by the Pact, the prominence of the war industry, official policies on the prohibition of technology exports, the blockade of Terra, and both excessive and anemic expenditures on public assistance programs, depending on who you ask. Others still lobby for aggressive action against what they see as totalitarian or chaotic states; the Mercenaries Alliance, the Jade Falcons, the Federated Hellfire Territories, or the Capellan Confederation, though it is hard to find a nation that isn’t the target of at least one protestor.

While other states and pundits scoff at security issues, citing the 3073 assassination attempt against New Earth proxy Chase Fe, rigorous security measures, friendly and omnipresent constabularies, growing national pride, and above all else, trust between the citizens of the Dragoons Pact and their government, have kept major incidents of violence from erupting.